Networking architectures have grown increasingly complex in modern communication environments. As the subscriber base of end users increases, proper routing and efficient management of communication sessions and data flows becomes critical. Internet Protocol (IP) communications generally provide different types of communication methods across a network (e.g., unicast and multicast). Unicast is a method of point-to-point communication, and it is typically used when two nodes need to exchange data, where neither node is concerned with sharing the data with multiple hosts. Multicast communications can allow a group of hosts to receive messages without broadcasting those messages to all of the hosts in the broadcast domain. In other instances, multicast communications can “flood” the broadcast domain, forwarding the messages to each node in the domain. A customer network or a customer device can be multi-homed to a provider network to help increase the reliability of the customer's connection to the provider network as well as other devices and networks connected through the provider network. Multi-homing can eliminate the possibility of a single point of failure (SPOF) for a network. A number of multi-homing techniques exist, including single link multiple IP address multi-homing, multiple interface multi-homing, multiple link single IP address multi-homing, and multiple link-multiple IP address multi-homing, as examples.
Like reference numbers and designations in the various drawings indicate like elements.